The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is thrilled to announce its 2024 Poetry Retreat, which runs from June 1-2, 2024. For the first time ever, this event will be entirely virtual held via Zoom. All SAFTA retreats focus on generative writing, and this year’s retreat will also include the following craft talk sessions: “Let’s Talk About Prose Poems” and “Third Space Grief: The (Written) Performance of Intersectional Mourning.” The event will be open to poets of all backgrounds and experience levels and provide an opportunity to work with many talented authors and poets from around the country, including workshop leaders Amorak Huey, Sarah A. Chavez, and keynote speaker Barbara Fant.
Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. He also is co-author with W. Todd Kaneko of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024) and Slash/Slash (2021), winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. Huey is a recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, and his poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and many other print and online journals.
Sarah A. Chavez, a California mestiza living in the PNW, is the author of the poetry collections, Hands That Break & Scar(Sundress Publications), All Day, Talking (dancing girl press), like everything else we loved, (Porkbelly Press) and Halfbreed Helene Navigates the Whole (Ravenna Press’ Triple Series). Recent writing projects have received a 2019-2020 Tacoma Artists Initiative Award, as well as residencies at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, the Macondo Writers Workshop, and The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow. Her new project, In the Face of Mourning was awarded a 2023 Scholarship & Research grant from the University of Washington Tacoma’s (UWT) School for Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Chavez teaches creative writing and Latinx/Chicanx-focused courses and serves as the poetry coordinator for Best of the Net Anthology.
Barbara Fant has been writing and performing for over 15 years. She competed in 9 National Poetry Slam competitions, and she is a World Poetry Slam finalist. She is the author of two poetry collections, Paint, Inside Out (2010) and Mouths of Garden (2022). Her work has been featured in the Academy of American Poets, Electric Literature, McNeese Review, The Ohio State University Press, Button Poetry, and Def Poetry Jam, amongst others. She has received residencies in Havana, Cuba and Senegal, West Africa. For over 12 years, she had led healing informed poetry workshops for both youth and adults who are incarcerated, those in community, adults in recovery, and survivors of human trafficking and domestic violence. She is certified as a Healing Centered Engagement specialist and holds both an MFA in Poetry and a Master of Theology. She is the founder of the Black Women Rise Poetry Collective and co-founder of The Senghor Project, West African International Artist Residency, and co-founder of We THRIVE Healing and Arts Collective.
The total cost of attendance is $75. Space at this workshop may be limited, so please reserve your place today.
Beth Couture
Rax King
For money, 
Macy French
Emari DiGiorgio is the author of Girl Torpedo, winner of the Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award, and The Things a Body Might Become. She’s the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, RHINO’s Founder’s Prize, and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet and the Senior Reviews Editor for Tupelo Quarterly, and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City, NJ.
Karen Craigo is the author of two Sundress collections: Passing Through Humansville (2018) and No More Milk (2016), as well as three chapbooks, and her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications. She is the editor of The Marshfield Mail newspaper in Marshfield, Missouri.
Ruth Awad is the author of Set to Music a Wildfire (Southern Indiana Review Press, 2017), which won the 2016 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2016 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, and she won the 2012 and 2013 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and the 2011 Copper Nickel Poetry contest. Her work has appeared in New Republic, The Missouri Review, CALYX, Diode, The Adroit Journal, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. Learn more at www.ruthawadpoetry.com.
received the Independent Publisher Book Awards Bronze in Poetry and the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her second book, Humanly, was released in 2015 by Small Doggies Press, and her chapbook, Sadness Workshop, is forthcoming from Button Poetry in January 2018. She has an M.F.A. in poetry from Cornell University and is a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at University of North Texas. Her writing is published and forthcoming in Indiana Review, Crazyhorse, TriQuarterly, Redivider, 32 Poems, West Branch, The Journal, Rattle, Verse Daily, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere.
